Globe and Mail reveals who is behind anti-Putin documentary "Navalny"

Barry Hertz has an interview with the Canadian director of the must-see documentary “Navalny” in the paper today. It’s an up-close look at the inner workings of Putin’s depraved, malevolent, paranoid, and incompetent inner circle. It made a splash at the Sundance Film Festival, and is now at Hot Docs in Toronto. It’s being heavily promoted by both CBC and the Globe. Director Dan Roher, a youngster with one previous doc under his belt, explains how the film came together. I was sitting around in lockdown, trying to figure out my next move… when in September 2020 I was invited to Vienna to meet this Bulgarian journalist, this Sherlock Holmes character named Christo Grozev. That trip turned into a visit to Kyiv. Christo said he might have a lead for Navalny. A week and a half later I met Alexy and it was now my job to convince him that not only was a documentary a good idea, but that it should be me who leads the project. It obviously wasn’t Dan Roher who lead the project, it was that “Sherlock Holmes character” Christo Grozev. Grozev has been “lead Russia investigator” at Bellingcat, which wants you to believe it is a collective of independent investigative journalists, since 2014. Oddly enough, this collective of independent journalists is funded by the US government via the National Endowment for Democracy. Odd, because the Assange case shows us all we need to know about America’s respect for independent journalism. Then again, it’s probably expecting too much of the journalists at CBC or the Globe & Mail to connect the dots.

When the story starts with "suspected Russian hackers" you know you're reading bullsh!t

I clicked on a CBC headline that told me Russian hackers had infiltrated the email system at the US Department of Homeland Security.

The first word in the story is "suspected."

Oh. So they don't actually know this to be true. But they're floating this story anyway, because, Putin.

You know, Putin's aggression and all that. Look how he persecutes those punk rock icons, Pussy Riot. Look at how he persecutes freedom and corruption fighters Bill Browder and Alexei Navalny. Look at how he grabbed that Crimean naval base right out from under the noses of the Americans.

Clearly, Putin must be stopped.

Therefore, even if we have absolutely nothing to definitively connect Russia to the SolarWinds hack, here's a bit of official speculation to get you headed in the right direction.

Perhaps by next week Bellingcat will have come up with the proof!

The super-awesome & miraculous intelligence scoops from Bellingcat

In the summer of 2014, things were pretty hot in the eastern reaches of Ukraine. The democratically elected Yanukovych government had been overthrown in a US engineered coup. Russia had subsequently absorbed Crimea, and there were fears of a wider conflict. This was the context of the shooting down of MH 17, a civilian Malaysian airliner.

The Americans realized they had a potential propaganda bonanza on their hands, if only they had something they could pass off as proof to pin the blame on the Russians. Alas, in spite of an army of thousands of analysts and data scientists, in spite of an array of spy satellites monitoring every square inch of Ukraine 24/7 in real time, in spite of vast networks of on-the-ground informants, and in spite of a budget in the many billions of dollars, they had nothing.

Enter Eliot Higgins, a thirty-something unemployed loafer in England. Eliot was able to prove what the US intelligence apparatus couldn't. Sure enough, the Ruskies had sneaked one of their missile systems across the border, shot down MH 17, and then skedaddled back over to Russia!

Hmm...

The nature of Higgins' "proofs" tends to leave more than a little bit desired, like any actual solid proof in the conventional sense of the word. Nevertheless, that was good enough to get him on the grant list at the National Endowment for Democracy, that US government-funded "non-government organization" specializing in distributing seed money to whatever fifth columns might further US interests in target nations.

Eliot was a guest on The Current this morning. Needless to say, host Matt Galloway didn't ask any  awkward questions about that US financing, or about anything else for that matter. Instead, we were treated to what was essentially twenty minutes of anti-Russian propaganda by a guy who collects money from the American government.

The CBC; using Canadian tax dollars to spread US propaganda.